


he repents in thorns that sleeps in a bed of roses

by KaffeineJunkie



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Beautiful Golden Fools, Canonical Incest, Character Study, Dialogue Heavy, Episode: s07e03 The Queen's Justice, F/M, POV Jaime Lannister, Porn With Plot, Sexy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 14:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20259907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaffeineJunkie/pseuds/KaffeineJunkie
Summary: In which Jaime decides thereissomething to be gained by discussing Cersei with The Queen of Thorns before she dies.





	he repents in thorns that sleeps in a bed of roses

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place entirely within episode 7x03, “The Queen’s Justice.” As usual, I’ve lifted elements of book-canon and elements of show-canon and mushed them together to suit my purposes, but essentially Jaime and Olenna talk about all the things Jaime normally has to keep trapped up tight, and Jaime thinks back to making love to Cersei (aka “the bro-job scene”) (tm Reddit). So, it’s dialogue heavy with very porny flashbacks. Yay! I thought Olenna’s reveal was perfect on the show, but I couldn’t resist wondering what she and Jaime might have talked about had he agreed to a longer chat before poisoning her. This is my little attempt to fill in those blanks. I’m extremely grateful for any feedback or character discussions anyone wishes to have. Thank you so much for taking a look!

** Highgarden **

“Your sister has done things I wasn’t capable of imagining. That was my prize mistake: a failure of imagination. She’s a monster, you do know that?”

“To you, I’m sure. To others as well. But after we’ve won, when there’s no one left to oppose us, when people are living, peacefully, in the world she built, do you really think they’ll wring their hands over the way she built it?”

The Queen of Thorns regards him, her expression one of pity and disgust. “You love her. You really do love her. You poor fool. She’ll be the end of you.”

“Possibly. Not much to be gained by discussing it with you, though, is there?”

“What better person to discuss it with? What better guarantee could you have that the things you say will never leave this room?”

Jaime considers her offer. There’s truth to her claims, and a certain appeal. He and Cersei used to have Tyrion for this; their little brother may have had opinions about his siblings, scathing ones even, but rarely _judgments_—not over this, at any rate. Those days are long over, and while Cersei had once weaponized their relationship in an attempt to thwart Father (briefly, thanks to Tyrion and his crossbow—), Jaime can’t remember confiding in anyone about it, save the Tully siblings of all people.

Their horrified reactions had amused him no end. Shackles freed him, apparently; as Lady Stark’s prisoner he’d bragged about his fidelity to Cersei and with Edmure as his captive, all heavy breaths and prissy indignation, he’d calmly laid out the lengths to which he’d go to return to her. Ahh, yes: Babies and catapults.

It might be nice to talk about Cersei over wine, in a civilized manner.

Well, not _exactly_ civilized.

Neither of them is in chains, stagnant in their own filth, but his army has just slaughtered the remaining golden roses, their bodies piled up outside. Olenna’s grandchildren are ashes where the Sept of Baelor once stood. Cersei had taken great pleasure in that, at first.

They rarely talk about consequences. They rarely talk about anything now.

Olenna’s gaze has drifted to the balcony, but her sharp eyes snap toward his when he clears his throat.

“What do you want to know?” he says. Sits across from her. Toys with his wine glass.

“In all the seven kingdoms there isn’t another woman for you, no, it _had_ to be your sister.” She rolls her eyes so hard they wobble like marbles in their sockets.

“Is there a question in there somewhere?”

“No woman is _that_ singular, _that_ good in the bedchamber.”

He shrugs. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve only ever been with Cersei.”

“You’ve convinced yourself it’s not only romantic, it’s noble.”

He makes to rise. “If you’re going to insult me, I don’t see this conversation lasting very long.”

She waves him back down. “Biting my tongue has never been my forte. Continue.”

“I’ve never wanted anyone else,” he says simply. He thinks of sky-blue eyes and a sword called Oathkeeper, belonging to a woman whose sense of honor he will never, ever live up to. But as much as he sometimes wishes otherwise, his initial statement stands.

“As to her skills, I can’t speak to that either, but I imagine if other women were _much_ better in the bedchamber there would be no need for war. Nobody would want to do anything else.”

“When did it start?”

He takes a sip of wine. “How do you mean?”

“I imagine you forced her, the first time…”

“I did not!”

“I’ve offended you, my goodness.”

He thinks of the Sept, their dead son laid out above them with eyes of painted stone. He’d ignored her protests—they had sounded so very far away—and soon enough they’d stopped, replaced by a low keening sound that would be as close as they got to a funeral dirge. But Cersei ignored Jaime’s protests all the time; it had never _changed_ anything between them. Why would it have?

“We’ve always been together,” he tells her. “You think it’s abhorrent, unnatural—"

“A stain, I believe I told your father.”

“But it wasn’t. It was the most natural thing in the world. It was…” he trails off.

“Impossible to put into words, apparently. That rapturous, was it?” She’s visibly irritated by his lack of explanation, and her irritation fuels his own.

“Do you think it felt good, growing up without a mother, without a father?” he snaps. “He was never there, not really, even when he was. We comforted each other. Those happy memories I mentioned? They’re mainly of Cersei. She—"

How can he explain to her, to _anyone_, that his reactions to the fact of Cersei are so deeply ingrained, so intertwined with every facet of his life, that even a tendril of lavender wafting through the air makes him hard? That when she enters a room he still can’t breathe, can’t move? That every synapse in his body is heightened by her presence? That a life without those feelings is not one he’d care to experience?

How many men can truthfully say those things about their wife or their mistress, for decades on end? None, he guesses.

If Olenna isn’t careful, he’ll tell her that, too. Make her squirm.

He steps off the ledge and falls into a dream.

“We were curious about our differences, like all children, but where most children stop, we kept… going.” If he sounds a bit proud, it’s because he is. “Being inside her was like returning to something. It didn’t just feel good. What I mean is, it felt incredible—like being strangled by dew—but it was much more than that. It—it made things _unspoiled_ again, like we were righting something that had gone wrong.”

Her snort of disbelief pulls him out of the dream. She doesn’t understand. Nobody ever does.

“I don’t need the torrid details,” she insists, though Jaime had not meant them to be torrid. “But as you got older,” she reasons, “you _must_ have known it was wrong. It’s not love, it’s a compulsion.”

“It _is_ love,” he tells her. “And I didn’t choose it.”

“Perhaps not. But you chose what to do about it. And you could have chosen differently.”

“Not any more than Loras or Renley could have.”

“At least their… experience of one another was _mutual_, so I hear,” she points out. “Do you think Cersei sits around wrapping a golden sheen around your childhood, waxing poetic about being ‘unspoiled’?”

“Cersei’s had my children,” he grits out. “_Only_ mine. When a kingdom was at stake, when discovery of it meant death. That’s devotion.”

“All three of them were yours, then?” she asks, her expression shifting to one of morbid curiosity. “I knew Joffrey must be, the unbelievable horror of him, but—"

“All three,” he repeats.

“And all three died hideously. Has it ever occurred to you the gods did not approve?”

“Fuck the gods,” he hisses. “The gods averted their eyes from me and Cersei long ago, they’ve never had a hand in my actions. They made me love her and then _left_ me to it.”

Her eyes dance. “Oh-ho, so that’s what it is, you feel abandoned by them. The heir of Casterly Rock doesn’t think the gods have been kind to him. How should the peasants feel, I wonder?”

He takes a pull off his wine. “Don’t you think if I could have _stopped_ loving Cersei I would have by now?”

“This is fascinating to witness. You really believe your own lies, don’t you?”

He slumps in his seat. What is he even doing? Why give her all this fodder?

“Perhaps not,” he says. “Perhaps I know it’s wrong, that it’s indefensible. Perhaps I’ve always known, and I just don’t care.”

Their eyes lock, and he grins. She scowls back but it makes no difference. He’s giddy suddenly, having said the words. Who knew?

He raises his glass in a mock toast, takes another sip, and thinks about the last time he drank wine, back in King’s Landing, after Euron Greyjoy dragged the Sand Snakes through the streets and chucked them at Cersei’s feet.

** King’s Landing **

Cersei doesn’t need his left hand in her hair, guiding her. She can make Jaime come as quickly or slowly as she likes. Within minutes he’s shooting down her throat, great ropes of it unspooling from his belly, a thread without end. She laps up every drop, murmuring encouragement, squeezing his ass. She continues to work him over, her tongue almost painful at this point, but she knows he has more to give, and she means to pull it from him.

On cue, a last, impossible spurt nearly brings him to his knees beside her. He whimpers, high in his throat, a sound he didn’t know he could make. Drunken warmth suffuses him, unrelated to the half-glass of wine he tossed back before she strutted into the room. No, this is just the effect she has on him. He’s dizzy and off-balance, his gold hand still on the table where she tossed it aside.

Whether that’s her way of saying she’s accepted it at last or simply an indication of her need right now, he can’t say. She’s in thrall to something.

She rocks back on her heels to look up at him. The candlelight dances and flickers across her face, casting her in light and shadow. He’s been reduced to rapid, shallow breaths.

It all happened so fast, but when her eyes glint dark with desire, he knows their evening has only started.

Whatever she’s in thrall to, he doubts it will be sated by sex but since it’s what he can offer her she’ll take it, she’ll take Jaime. No matter how many times she comes it won’t be enough. They’ll be up for hours trying to reach the endpoint of her need.

It’s his favorite kind of failure. The kind he lives for.

He tucks his cock away and drags his fingers through his hair. Expels a long, slow breath.

** Highgarden **

“You don’t actually imagine she’s been faithful to you?” Olenna asks, eyebrows raised.

“She was married.”

“I’m not talking about that blithering idiot. The High Sparrow” (she spits on the floor) “had her dead to rights on adultery, _and not with you_.”

He bristles. “She needed Lancel’s obedience, had to make sure he’d do as told at a moment’s notice.”

“Does it vex you she relied on a child to do her dirty work, instead of you?”

“I was gone, and there was no time to think. Ned Stark was threatening her. As a woman I should think you’d be familiar with the kinds of choices—sacrifices—women have to make when they don’t have power.”

“She was the queen; he was a squire. She didn’t need to bat her eyelashes at him, let alone spread her legs. He would have done whatever she asked, and deep down you must know that.”

“What can I say?” he answers flatly. “Teenage boys are motivated by their cocks.”

“Teenage boys,” she scoffs, “Please. You’re motivated by it still.” She nods her head toward the balcony. “The world of men _deserves_ to perish. I just wish you had the decency to leave us women out of it.”

“She didn’t _want_ him in her bed, it was a strategy.” His insistence is petulant, he knows, but he can’t let her have the last word on the subject.

Lancel had never made her come, not once, Cersei had promised, her lips on his neck. Any pleasure their encounters generated came from her imagination, if at all. Wasn’t he sixteen and a Lannister? Hadn’t she been recreating Jaime the best way she knew how? Far from disturbing Jaime, Lancel’s age and family name were the attributes that made it okay.

And then, _then_, hadn’t she cried so prettily for him? Hadn’t she whispered that it was never any good with anyone but Jaime? Hadn’t she proved it by letting him fuck her in the ass? He made her tell him again and again, blood and spit and oil seeping around his cock as he took her in her tightest of holes.

It was never any good, she hiccuped, never any good with anyone but Jaime.

“Do you wish you’d been better at keeping your oaths?” Olenna wonders, changing the subject.

“If I had been you wouldn’t have liked the outcome, believe me. I’ve come to learn that any oath you’re forced to make is worthless. The oaths you make in private are the only ones that matter.”

“What oaths might those be?” she asks.

“The ones to Cersei. To keep her—"

“—pretending to share your affection?”

“To keep her _safe_,” he interrupts, his ears ringing.

The look Olenna gives him is dubious to say the least.

“To keep her in power,” he amends.

“Because if she’s not in power she’d rather be dead,” Olenna says. “And if she’s dead, you’d rather follow her then remain in a world you helped destroy.”

She’s nailed it completely, but he refuses to let his expression betray this fact.

“In the meantime, surely you’ve noticed Cersei has no one left to answer to,” Olenna continues. “No pesky heirs rendering her irrelevant; no fat Baratheons mucking up her plans; no House Tyrell to play at second fiddle. Why not become the Targaryens, marry brother to sister, and be done with it?”

“There is the small matter of an actual Targaryen at the gate.”

“You’re in possession of my riches, now, if nothing else. The free cities would welcome you, no questions asked. Dragon queens notwithstanding, if she wanted to be safe, with you, Cersei could leave at any moment.” Olenna makes a show of tapping her chin in faux-contemplation. “Why doesn’t she, I wonder?”

Jaime’s teeth grind against each other. He knows she’s trying to sew doubt. “It’s not that simple.”

“Is that the appeal, then? Knowing you’ll never quite catch her? You may come close, she may even _tell_ you you’ve caught her, but that will not make it true.”

** King’s Landing **

Cersei rises from the floor and pours herself some wine, using Jaime’s cup. Smiles at him over the rim, pleased with herself.

He likes the idea of his come pooling hot in her belly. Imagines the wine dousing it, steam rising as it hits.

The instant she sets the cup down he kisses her. Her hands fly up, scraping into his hair, pressing their mouths harder together. Her tongue is thick with alcohol and the starch of his seed. His missing hand ghosts the air next to her hip, still accustomed to gripping her there.

She takes charge, sliding his left hand to the small of her back, anchoring them together in the storm.

** Highgarden **

“I can’t marry her yet because Euron Greyjoy thinks she’s going to marry _him_. Right now, we need that alliance.”

“And once he outlives his usefulness?”

“We haven’t thought that far ahead.”

“You never do, do you? Mark my words, it will never be the right time for Cersei and Jaime,” she predicts in a sing-song tone.

There’s a buzzing in his ears now, making it difficult to hear.

** King’s Landing **

Cersei undresses and crawls into bed. She stretches, full length, slim and golden, all the way to the tips of her toes, which curl and flex. A lioness through and through.

Her method of toying with her prey means playing with herself in front of him before he can do anything about it. He’s still recovering from her initial greeting.

Eyes locked on the pulsing fingertips between her legs, Jaime shrugs out of his own clothes and stalks toward her.

He had assumed she’d take it slow now, considering how fast she’d sucked him off earlier, but Cersei’s pace seems as frantic now as it was when she first arrived. Her cunt pushes and pulls against the length of her fingers, swallowing and releasing them.

He lies on his side to watch her. It’s still the dead of night, still black outside. Only crickets awake. She’s a fierce mask of concentration, eyes clenched shut, and when her mouth falls slack, wet and welcome and open, he leans down and kisses her there. She’s not surprised. She smiles against his lips.

He wets his thumb and middle finger, rolls her nipple between them. “More,” she whispers, and then, “harder.” She pushes her breast into his hand, cooing mindlessly, and he twists the pink flesh, chasing her approval.

“Good, Jaime, yes,” she gasps, and it’s shameful, it’s so shameful, what the barest amount of her praise does to him.

She comes quickly after that, rapid breaths filling her lungs. Her hips arch off the bed, muscles straining and releasing. She brings her hand up to show him how slick she is. Her arousal connects her fingers like webbing, sleek and clear. He sucks her fingers one by one into his mouth and her smile widens, lazily; it’s his own post-orgasm smile, and it looks so good on her.

Fully erect now, he props himself above her and she curls her fingers around his stiff length and guides him to her opening. The silky-wet folds draw him in, a velvet fist closing around him, and he rolls his hips in a steady motion until he’s sheathed. _At last_, he thinks, _a good, slow fuck_, the kind he didn’t realize he’d been anticipating since the moment he saw her crowned. The shock of it, the awful truth of what it represented had been too much to take, so he’d kept to himself, avoided her, but all the while a thrilling thought swam below the surface of his mind like a shark. _She can have any lover she wants now, with no one to speak against it_.

She writhes below him, meets his thrusts with a bucking of her hips. He gets to share her bed all night and he will never tire of it, never.

By unspoken agreement they contain each other, quelling the urge to speed up. Their bodies slide together at the pace of a low tide, rising and receding. The fluttering of her cunt nearly undoes him, and he’s only just pulled himself back from the brink when Cersei squeezes her tits and slips her hand down her trembling stomach, lower, between them now, pressing down at the place where they join in a tight oval of friction. He knows her clit is still swollen and aching, a perfect little pearl, and when her fingertip gets to work, the intensity of watching her bring herself off yet again sends him on a trajectory he couldn’t alter even if he wanted to. Their pace quickens, and she arches upward, her mouth finding the spot below his ear. She bites him with soft teeth, against his cheek, down his jaw, never ceasing the moments below.

He pushes wildly against her and this time they crest the shore together, gasping.

Afterward, she sleeps like the dead.

He knows her love is conditional. He’s not a _complete_ idiot.

But oh! when you’ve _met_ those conditions, it’s a rush, sheer bliss, nothing on earth compares.

It’s not as though he’s the only person who’s fallen into the trap of imagining Cersei’s behavior could ever be steered or controlled. It’s practically a requirement for anyone who comes into contact with her. He’s seen it before, the moment the realization hits: _If I just do what she wants me to do, she’ll love me._ And once you’ve had a taste of her love—set aflame by Cersei’s soft voice, gentle eyes, unexpected humor—it’s in your blood and living without it is physically _painful_.

If there’s any chance you can get it back—even a diminished, pale version of it—you aim for it. Of course, you do. Sansa Stark comes to mind. Back at Winterfell he’d observed their interaction at the feast, Cersei shining down at her, the girl melting into a puddle of goo at the compliments Cersei handed out like sweets. The child had no idea she’d just experienced the most seductive version of Cersei and it would all be downhill from there.

The problem was, Cersei might rail and fume against you, but that didn’t mean it was truly over. There was always a chance you could scramble or claw your way back into the warmth of her good graces, and your odds obviously increased if you behaved in a manner you thought she would like.

Jaime watches her breathe, enjoying the peaceful expression on her face, her palm curled below his.

** Highgarden **

“You’ve gone quiet,” he remarks. “You’re the one who wanted this conversation.”

“I’m trying to recall if you’re the biggest fool I’ve ever met. It would be quite a distinction, given how many fools I’ve endured, and how very long I’ve lived. I suppose if she’s driven you this far it’s gone beyond your control.”

“Yes, it has.”

“How will it happen?”

“Cersei had several ideas. Whipping you through the streets and beheading you in front of the Red Keep. Flaying you alive and hanging you from the walls of King’s Landing. But I talked her out of those.”

He removes the vial, pops the lid off.

Olenna’s eyes follow his movements. “How did you get her to agree to poison?”

“You want the sordid details?”

“I suppose what I’m really asking is, how does one get a woman like Cersei to change her mind? About anything?”

“We were mid-fuck.” He leans in, as though explaining. “I had something she wanted.”

“I deeply regret asking.”

He shrugs. “We discuss a lot of things when I’m inside her. If it makes you feel better, we also talked about Father. What he’d think of our plan to sacrifice the rock.”

She looks ill. “That makes me feel decidedly worse.”

He’s on a roll now, revealing things that have lived inside him with no escape for so long. “That’s nothing. Once she asked me to punish one of the Stark girls who’d run off.”

“ ‘Asked’ you?”

“Told me,” he concedes.

_I want---! _

“It was during the journey back from Winterfell. Robert was passed out drunk beside us while we screwed. He could’ve woken at any moment. They had those beastly direwolves at the time, and it had become something of a problem. I wasn’t the one who ended up finding the girl, but if I had…” he lets the rest of the sentence hang in the air. “I’m not sure what I’d have done. Killed her? Maimed her? Brought her back to the wheelhouse unharmed and faced Cersei’s wrath myself?”

“Joffrey had a whipping boy, as I recall. Why shouldn’t his mother have one?”

He’s having trouble following her line of thought, and he senses their conversation is winding down anyway.

“You’re not a lion at all, are you?” Olenna muses. “I don’t know what you are. I don’t think you know, either. Some type of hybrid creature. A chimera. Part goat, part snake. You used to be a Lannister. Even had the golden mane. What did they do to you when they chopped off your hand? You have no core, no sense of self to fall back on. There isn’t a vow you won’t break. You have nothing and no one to keep you grounded.”

“I have _her_.”

“She’s a disease. I regret my role in spreading it. You will, too.”

He’s tired. In his bones, in his heart. “I think we’re done here.”

“Will there be pain?”

“No, I made sure of that.”

She nods, visibly relieved. “That’s good.”

She drinks the entire glass of poisoned wine in one gulp.

“I’d hate to die like your son. Clawing at my neck, foam and bile spilling from my mouth. Eyes blood red. Skin purple. Must have been horrible for you as a kingsguard, as a father. It was horrible enough for me. A shocking scene. Not at all what I intended. You see, I had never seen the poison work before. Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me.”

He’s so appalled that he leaves the room immediately, lest he strangle her with his bare hands. In the hall, down the stairs, past the bodies piled up along the grounds, he’s in a fog. Should he tell Cersei, or not? Would that be playing into Olenna’s hands? Or did Olenna believe she’d used reverse-reasoning on him, that because she asked him to tell, he’ll be more likely to keep it a secret until the information ate him alive?

He can’t breathe. He can’t focus.

It’s not just Joffrey, it’s everything Joffrey’s death set into motion, countless atrocities branching off from that one moment. Where to start? Where to look first?

Joffrey’s death put Tommen on the throne. Trusting, susceptible Tommen. His youngest boy, his good boy.

Joffrey’s death brought about Cersei’s madness, her crazed vengeance.

Tyrion’s false imprisonment.

The trial.

Tywin’s death.

The loss of their protector. The loss of his brother and father and all his children.

Without Tywin there to crush them, the faith militant took over the city. It’s impossible to untangle the consequences, there were so many of them. He and Cersei never talk about the consequences.

In murdering Joffrey, the Queen of Thorns set them against each other like a pit of snakes. They’d done themselves in. All she had to do was sit back and watch while they hissed and bit and suffocated each other. Cersei’s children, gone. House Lannister annihilated, wiped off the earth, no less than House Tyrell. She’d ruined them.

He gasps for air and leans against the wall. He thinks he might vomit, and the thought turns it true, turns it into sour liquid burning up his throat and out his nostrils in a gush, onto the ground, onto his boots.

Snakes, nothing but a pit of snakes. The Viper. Oh gods, the trial by combat, Oberyn Martell’s death, which led to Myrcella’s murder. Precious, soft-hearted Myrcella. Tyrion’s defection. Vipers and snakes, the whole bloody lot of them.

Much like Cersei sitting on the iron throne, cruel spiked armor in place, it’s too much to process.

He wipes his mouth, gags on a dry heave, slides to the dirt. His mind spins and searches, frantic to attach itself to anything else, any other thought. Any thought but this one.

What was it she’d called him, before she’d said what she’d said about Joffrey?

A chimera, a changeling.

_I don’t know what you are. I don’t think you know, either._

But he does know. He _does._

He’s whatever Cersei needs him to be.

_fin._


End file.
